The disclosure relates generally to injector apparatuses and reheat combustors for fuel and air. More specifically, the disclosure relates to reheat combustors and injectors for fuel and air which modify the performance and output of a power generation system, such as a gas turbine system or turbomachine.
Turbine systems are frequently used to generate power for, e.g., electric generators. A working fluid such as hot gas or steam can flow across sets of turbine blades, mechanically coupled to a rotor of the turbine system. The force of the working fluid on the blades causes those blades (and the coupled body of the rotor) to rotate. In many cases, the rotor body is coupled to the drive shaft of a dynamoelectric machine such as an electric generator. In this sense, initiating rotation of the turbine rotor can also rotate the drive shaft in the electric generator to generate an electrical current and a particular power output.
To generate the working fluid in a combustion-based turbomachine, a fuel can combust within a combustor and in the presence of oxygen to generate a hot gas stream for actuating the blades of the turbine system. In some systems, a portion of the air may not react in the combustor, and may continue downstream through the gas turbine system. To improve the power output and efficiency of the turbomachine, this unreacted air can enter another combustor known as a reheat combustor. In the reheat combustor, the unreacted air can combust in the presence of additional fuel to generate more hot gas and actuate a latter turbine stage of the turbomachine. This type of turbomachine is known in the art as a reheat turbine.
A reheat turbine has the potential to attain greater efficiencies than what is currently known in the art. The efficiency of existing combined cycle plants, which can include reheat turbines, may be limited by the output and/or efficiency of the reheat combustor. In particular, designing the reheat combustor to have a different outlet temperature from that of the first combustor can influence power output (e.g., by increasing or decreasing the amount of fuel and combustion energy in the reheat combustor), and emissions (e.g., by combustion reactions in the reheat combustor outputting different amounts of carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide, (CO2) in addition to nitrogen oxide or nitrogen dioxide, known collectively as “NOx”).